Thursday, March 24, 2016

Star Wars: The Black Series: Emperor’s Wrath Darth Vader





What Imperial collection is complete without Darth Vader? This figure is the second Black Series Vader that has come along, and is quite an interesting entry to the line.

A head-scratchingly bizarre Walgreens exclusive figure, Emperor’s Wrath Vader is a figure of the final moments of the Luke/Vader/Emperor battle at the end of Return of the Jedi, after Luke has cut off Vader’s hand and after Vader has thrown the Emperor down the Death Star shaft. Oh, geez, sorry. I probably should have dropped a “spoiler alert” there before I blabbed away. The helmet is a translucent purple, replicating the literal frame of the movie where the Force lightning allows us to see the skull beneath Vader’s helmet. Very, very cooly, the right hand is also removable, and the wrist has some painted wires and stuff, meant to replicate a severed robotic wrist. 


Vader, both of them, has a cloth cape and a two piece lightsaber, the blade being just a strip of soft red plastic that can thankfully be removed. Thankfully, because things like lightsabers are always breakage concerns, being so thin and flimsy. Not meant as a criticism of the pieces, but they are basically just sticks the figures hold, and a fall from a shelf or settling at the bottom of a storage box or something is liable to snap the weapon. There is no way to plug the saber hilt onto a belt or anything, so its display options are pretty much “held in hand” or “not”. I don’t think that’s a loss of any kind, but I can imagine that some people might like that option. The cloth cape is nice, nicer than a plastic one like on Phasma, and it gives the figure a little something extra in terms of a look. There’s a clear separation between materials here, and obvious plastic figure and an obvious cloth cape, that adds a level of depth when looking at it from a distance, such as it being on a shelf, that just doesn’t happen with a figure like Phasma. I don’t really know how to explain it, but it’s like looking at a 3D figure. Also real nice is the actual chain around Vader's neck.


The Vader body is very nicely made, and has painted buttons on the chest and everything. The arms are not very bendable, essentially managing 45-50 degree bends at the elbows. The hands do have wrist swivels, and the left hand is molded in an open palm, slightly curled fingers way, like in that frame right before Vader tells Luke they can rule the galaxy as father and son from The Empire Strikes Back. I feel like Emperor’s Wrath Vader and regular Vader are different figures, both made the same way: EW Vader seems a tiny bit larger than the regular Vader, probably to accommodate the head inside the head; but regular Vader had a removable helmet that revealed ROTJ Anakin’s face underneath. But, EW Vader’s helmet does not open, which is kind of strange, since the notable feature of this figure is the face underneath the helmet. You can see through the helmet fairly well, although it is hard to catch a light that will give a full look at the head. You can see that it is the bald ROTJ Anakin head, with the eyes blacked out, a nice, sort of frightening touch. You can see there are veins or scars, probably scars, really, on the sides of the head, and there’s some kind of plate on the top of the head. I wish the helmet was removable, because I would really like to look at the head sculpt with my own eyes (. . . . !), because it was clearly made with an attention to detail, not just a translucent Vader helmet. 

I suppose it is inevitable with Star Wars figures: if a character appears on screen, they will eventually get a figure. It’s also not unusual to have multiple representations of the same figure, all with a slight difference or a different accessory or something to represent their different appearance in the movies. How many 3.75” Vaders are there with some kind of translucent parts, to represent this very scene in Jedi? I don’t know, at least one, because I know I own at least one. But this may be the first, or second, or maybe third, entry in The Black Series of a figure that is representing only a brief second or three of film. I feel like the figure doesn’t go as far as it could to really stand out as this specific moment in the film; maybe some Force lightning pieces would have been good to include, so that you could put them on Vader to drive the moment home. You know they have made those Force lighting wrap around parts before, I know some of the Revenge of the Sith figures came with them. Light blue translucent seaweed-esque parts that sort of fit over a figures’ arm or head, and then made it look like the figure was being attacked with said lightning. I don’t own the Emperor Palpatine figure from this line, but I cannot believe that he didn’t come with some of that stuff. I know I have some of those pieces in my Star Wars storage box, and if I get a chance, I think I am going to try and dig it out and see how it looks on Vader here. One of these days….

EW Vader is currently easier to get than regular Vader, and at last weekend’s C2E2 I saw dealer after dealer after dealer with several of this figure. But, I don’t think I saw anyone who had regular Vader. The other Black Series Walgreens exclusive, the prototype Boba Fett, got real rare real fast, but I found this Vader at an actual Walgreens store. Perhaps this is what happened to the prototype Fett: maybe dealers went to Walgreens and bought the entire case, and then marked it up ten bucks. Because of the translucent head, this is not a good ‘regular’ Vader, so if your shelf is missing a Darth Vader, you still need to track down the original release.

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